Using a Frontend JavaScript Library with Django

Django is a great tool for building the backend of an application. You have seen how easy it is to set up the database, route URLs, and render templates. Without using JavaScript, though, when those pages are rendered to the browser, they are static and do not provide any form of interaction. By using JavaScript, your pages can be transformed into applications that are fully interactive in the browser.

This chapter will provide a brief introduction to JavaScript frameworks and how to use them with Django. While it won’t be a deep dive into how to build an entire JavaScript application from scratch (that would be a book in itself), we will give enough of an introduction so that you can add interactive components to your own Django application. In this chapter, we will primarily be working with the React framework. Even if you do not have any JavaScript experience, we will introduce enough about it so that you will be comfortable...